Theft (4 page)

"How was the crossing?" I asked. "Were you scared?"

"Never by the crossing." She sat heavily in my chair and exhaled--a different person now, messier, less brisk. She produced from the folds of her borrowed poncho, a magnum of 1972 Virgin Hills which she held like a trophy in the air.

Later she told me that I had cocked my head, looking at the wine like a sulky dog, but that was a misunderstanding. This was a prize bottle from Dozy's cellar. There was nothing to explain it and the mystery was made deeper by her manner--she was suddenly so full of energy, kicking off her gumboots, opening up a drawer--did she wait to ask permission? She located a corkscrew, ripped out the cork, brushed down her skirt, sat cross-legged on the kitchen chair and, while she watched me pour the Virgin Hills, she just plain grinned at me.

"OK," I said. "What happened?"

"Nothing," she said, her eyes sparkling to the point of carbonation. "Where's your brother? Is he OK?"

"Asleep."

Whatever dark visions she then conjured--probably the drowning dog--she could not stay with long. "The good thing," she said, raising her glass, "is that Mr. Boylan knows his Leibovitz is real."

"Jacques Leibovitz?" "That's the one."

"Dozy owns a painting by Jacques Leibovitz?"

I know now that my astonishment seemed put-on to her, but the secretive bugger Dozy had never breathed a word about his treasure. Also, you do not go to northern New South Wales to look at great paintings. And again: Leibovitz was one of the reasons I became an artist. I had first seen Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois at Bacchus Marsh High School, or at least a black-andwhite reproduction in Foundation of the Modern. None of this I was prepared to confess to an American in Manolo Blahniks but I was really offended by Dozy, my so- called mate. "We never even talk about art," I said. "We sit in his miserable

kitchen, that's where he lives, amongst all those piles of the Melbourne Age. And he showed it to you"?"

She raised an eyebrow as if to say, Why not? All I could think was that I had given him lovely drawings of the Wombat Fly and Narrow-waisted Mud Wasp and he had stuck them to his fridge with fucking magnets. It was hard to believe he had an eye at all.

"Are you insuring it?"

She laughed through her nose. "Is that what I look like?" I shrugged.

She returned a clear appraising gaze. "Do you mind if I smoke?"

I fetched her a saucer and she blew some dungy-smelling fumes across the table. "My husband," she said finally, "is the son of Leibovitz's second wife."

If I did not like her, I liked the husband way, way less. But I was startled and impressed to understand whose son he was.

"Dominique Broussard is his mother?" "Yes," she said. "You know the photograph?"

Even I knew that--the tawny blonde studio assistant lying on an unmade bed, her new baby at her breast.

"My husband, Olivier, he's the baby. He inherited the Leibovitz droit moral" she said, as though having to explain a story she was weary of.

But I was not weary, not at all. I was from Bacchus Marsh, Victoria. I hadn't seen an original painting before I turned sixteen.

"You understand how that works?" "What?"

"Droit moral."

"Of course," I said. "More or less."

"Olivier is the one who gets to say if the work is real or fake. He signed the certificate of authentication for Boylan's painting. That is his legal right, but there have been people making mischief, and we have to protect ourselves." "You work together, you and your husband?"

But she was not being drawn into that. "I've known Mr.

Boylan's painting for a very long time," she said, "and it is authentic right down to the zinc tacks on the stretcher, but the point has to be proven again and again. It's a little boring."

"And you know that much about Leibovitz?"

"That much," she said dryly, and I watched as she butted out her cigarette, grinding it fiercely into the saucer. "But when someone like Boylan is told that his investment is at risk, he is bound to get upset. In this case he showed the canvas to Honore Le Noel who persuaded him he'd bought, not quite a fake, but close enough. May I have more wine? I'm sorry. It's been a hell of a day."

I poured the wine without comment, not revealing that I was completely gobsmacked to hear Le Noel's name spoken as if he were the local publican or the owner of a hardware store. I knew who he was. I had two of his books beside my bed. "Honore Le Noel has become a joke," she said. "He was Dominique Leibovitz's lover, as you probably know."

This sort of talk upset me in ways I can hardly bring myself to name. At the heart of it was the notion that I was a hick and she was from the centre of the fucking universe. What I knew you could read in Time magazine--Dominique had begun as Leibovitz's studio assistant; Le Noel was Leibovitz's chronicler and critic.

Now that my visitor was halfway through her second glass, she was talkative as hell. She revealed that Dominique and Honore had spent almost eight years, from just after the war until 1954, waiting for Leibovitz to die. (I recalled that the artist's strength was very acutely sketched in Le Noel's monograph--a force of life, short, thick legs, huge square hands.)

It was not until his baby son was five, his daughter-in-law now told me, when Leibovitz himself was eighty-one, that the grim reaper came sneaking up on the old goat, pushing him forward as he stood at the dinner table with a wine glass brimming in his hand. He pitched forward and slammed his broad nose and tortoiseshell spectacles into the Picasso cheese plate. That is how my visitor

told it, fluently, a little breathlessly. She finished the second glass without remarking on its character and for this, of course, I judged her quite severely. The plate cracked in half, she said.

I thought, How would you fucking know? Were you even born?

But I was a stranger to the notion that one might know famous people and of course she was married to the witness, the child-- an olive-skinned boy with very large watchful eyes and protruding ears which could not even begin to spoil his beauty.

When his father had fallen dead he apparently had been about to ask if he might be excused, but now he looked to his mother and waited. Dominique did not embrace him but stroked his cheek with the back of her hand.

"Papa est mort." "Oui, Maman."

"You understand. No-one must know yet." "Oui, Maman."

"Maman must move some canvases, do you understand? It is difficult because of the snow."

I have recently observed French children, how they sit, so neat with their big dark eyes, and their clean fingernails collected in their laps. What miracles they are. I suppose Olivier sat like that, watching his dead father, but holding a dreadful secret of his own--he had been, at the very moment when his father fell, about to go and make pee-pee.

"Don't move, you understand?"

Of course there was no need for him to be tortured in the chair.

But his mother was about to commit a major crime, that is remove paintings from the estate before the police were notified. "Stay there," she said. "Then I'll know where you are."

Then she was on the telephone, persuading her posh lover to leave his fireside at Neuilly, explaining that they could not afford to wait for the snow to melt, that he must go all the way to Bastille, collect a truck, and drive it to the rue de Rennes.

Somewhere in the confusion and terror of the night the little boy peed his pants, although this misadventure was not discovered until much later, when Honore finally noticed him sleeping with his forehead on the table, and then Dominique took a bloody photograph. Imagine! Later, for whatever reason--perhaps the missing Le Golem electrique was in the shot--she tore half of it away. It might have provided the only forensic evidence of that long night when Dominique Broussard and Honore Le Noel stole some fifty Leibovitzes, many of them abandoned or incomplete, works that would later, with the signature added and some careful revision, become very valuable indeed. They removed them to a garage near the Canal Saint-Martin, the source of that frequently reported "watermark" on a whole array of doubtful Leibovitzes from widely different periods. From this day no-one ever saw the painting that Leo Stein and the fiercer (and therefore more reliable) Picasso both described as a masterwork. Stein referred to it as Le Golem electrique, Picasso as Le Monstre.

It was not until lunch the following day that Dominique reported her husband's death to the gendarmes, and then, of course, the studio was--as is the law in France--sealed off and a full accounting made of the paintings remaining there. No Le Golem electrique. Oh, never mind.

Dominique, the daughter of a tax accountant from Marseilles, now had sufficient Leibovitzes, almost-Leibovitzes and unborn- Leibovitzes to live very well for the next fifty years. Also, of course, she inherited the droit moral. That gave her the right to authenticate, which is, incredible as it may seem, the law, but now she chose to give her rather louche reputation a more reliable character and so she set up Le Comite Leibovitz, and installed the esteemed Honore Le Noel as chair.

It must have seemed perfect from her point of view: they could back up their false assertions with those of greedy dealers and collectors on the Comite. The pair of them could spend the rest of their lives signing unsigned canvases and revising abandoned works.

The storyteller was pretty, filled with talk, thirsty for more wine.

I poured her a third glass of Virgin Hills and began to permit myself a few ideas.

"Now," she said, brushing ash from her lovely ankle, "Dominique discovered Honore in bed with Roger Martin."

"The English poet." "Exactly. Him. You know him?" "No."

"Thank God for that." She raised an eyebrow. If I did not know exactly what she meant, I enjoyed the sense of complicity.

"So they divorced, of course. But no-one knows exactly how their hoard of paintings was finally divided," she said.

But Dominique, it seems, knew a lot of "partisans", tough guys, and she almost certainly got the lion's share. So by the time Honore had been robbed, circled, outnumbered, and defeated on the Comite, he had become a very dangerous man. Certainly he hated Dominique. Towards her innocent son he displayed an even greater antipathy.

When, in 1969, one of her lovely partisan pals strangled Dominique in a Nice hotel, Olivier was already in London, losing the last of his French accent at St. Paul's. Knowing less than nothing about his father's work, he inherited the droit moral.

"You meet my husband," Marlene said, "you think he is so gentle, and he is, but when Honore began a legal action to take away the droit moral, Olivier fought like a tiger. You have seen the photographs? He was a child, so pretty, with lovely eyelashes, seventeen years old, but he loathed Honore. I cannot tell you to what degree. When you think about the court case, this was really the only point for Olivier."

We are the nation of Henry Lawson and the campfire yarn, but just the same we are very bloody wary of people doing what Marlene was doing now. We are inclined to wonder, Is she a name-dropper? Does she have tickets on herself? At the same time, no-one in this paddock has ever spoken like this, not ever, and I was literally on the edge of my chair, watching with the most particular attention as she blew on her Marlboro so its tip burned evenly.

"By the time all this was over, Olivier could not so much as touch one of his father's paintings. He hated them. He hates them now. These great works of art make him ill, really, physically ill."

This was interesting, I didn't say it wasn't. "But why, for Christ's sake, did Dozy hide the painting from me?"

She shrugged. "Rich people!"

"He was frightened anyone would know he had something so valuable?" "It's an asset," she said derisively. "That's how it is with them.

It's there to own, not to see. But if the market believed Honore's story--that this precious painting was somehow doctored--my husband would have been ruined. We would have been exposed for the loss, a million US dollars, probably more." "You and your husband?"

"Yes." She almost smiled.

"And of course Honore is just a malicious little shit," she said, "but he must be answered, so I sent up two forensic chemists to do an independent pigment analysis. Indeed, I think one of them met your brother in the pub. He thought he was amazing."

"Sometimes he is."

"In any case," she said quickly, "my independent chemists also echoed Honore, fretting about the presence of titanium dioxide in the white. This was not in common use in 1913, so for them this was what they call"--she made a mocking face--"a red flag.

Fortunately, Dominique lived in a pigsty, hoarding every tram ticket, every restaurant bill, so we had a great archive, thank God. And there at last I found not only the letter from Leibovitz to his supplier requesting titanium white but also a receipt, dated January 1913. That's enough. It doesn't matter it was not in common use. Honore can go fuck himself. Your friend has a real Leibovitz. I brought him the documentation personally so it can be with the painting forever

now. I actually attached it for him, in an envelope on the back of the stretcher."

She held out her glass and I filled it. "Hence the celebration."

"Very good wine too." And I was now, having waited so long, all set to give her a big lecture on what she had been gulping down--the work of Tom Lazar and his vineyard at Kyneton, about this treasure growing in the shitty dun-coloured landscape of my childhood--but just as I was about to establish my sophistication, she let it slip that Dozy's painting was Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois, the same work I had first seen in reproduction at Bacchus Marsh High School. This seemed, that night, such a sweet and magical connection, and what my childhood self would have seen as showing off or namedropping became transmuted into something you could call noble, and we sat there until the early morning, finishing up Lazar's third vintage, the rain drumming on the roof, and I relaxed, finally, while this strange and lovely woman described the entire canvas for me, speaking in a low soft throaty voice, beginning, not at the top left-hand corner, but with the cadmium yellow stroke which marks the edge of the young wife's blouse, a slice of light.